Report: Papa Will Be So Very Cross You’ve Lost Grandfather’s Hunting Cap

YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND—Lamenting the heedless manner in which you handled a most cherished accoutrement, sources opined Wednesday that Papa shall be so very cross you’ve lost Grandfather’s hunting cap. “Papa will simply throw a fit, a very conniption or temper, to learn that his own father’s homburg—as fine a specimen of the haberdasher’s craft as one could hope to see, with a lovely emerald Panamanian woodpecker’s feather set jauntily aslant in the band—that this hat of the very world, as it were, has been lost forever,” said Mother, entreating you to be more ruminative in your comportment, for Papa took great pride in displaying Grandfather’s hunting cap, the aforementioned charcoal-brimmed Lock & Co., with its chestnut gutter crown encircled by a grosgrain band of dark crimson, which you abandoned as one would a parcel of rubbish. “I do beg you, on my love for you and for your own sake: Be more vigilant in your care of our heirlooms. For Father holds it as very Scripture that he who would lose a hat would lose an estate; and this season has been ever so hard for him that I fear the loss of his hunting cap will leave him utterly melancholic. And however shall Papa lead the Easter fox hunt without his full complement of sporting attire? That cap was gifted to Grandfather by his dear friend Hugo Reisinger, that selfsame Herr Doktor Reisinger who co-devised the mercurial-barometric storm-glass, and now, thanks to your negligence, the coachman’s brats are no doubt cutting ear-holes in the felting of its brim, that it may better fit atop their mule. Oh, no. Do you hear that? I fear Papa’s carriage draws near, and with it, a reckoning.” Fearing that you may soon be forced to bear the worst of Papa’s more base and physical humours, Mother has advised you to take your leave for now and find occupation in the library while she endeavored to determine whether Grandfather’s hunting cap could yet be retrieved.